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Sequels, as anyone schooled in Hollywood knows, are difficult to pull off. The dilemma — how much of the first should find its way into the next? — has confounded many creative minds in this town, so it was probably too much to hope that Michael Caine could beat the odds, though he's made a career of doing just that. "The Elephant to Hollywood," a follow-up to the actor's popular 1992 autobiography, comes lumbering along as more addendum than memoir, more rehash than new dish, but served up with enough warmth and charm that you may be fine with leftovers.
Eighteen years ago, in "What's It All About?," Caine took his first cut at how a hardscrabble childhood in the South London project called the Elephant and Castle (thus the book's title) turned into an unexpectedly successful, sometimes brilliant career. He was nearing 60 at the time, thought his acting days were behind him, and the light and lively look back in that book was entertaining, brisk and quickly turned into a bestseller.

Then came the surprise of the next 18 years, into which Caine packed 35 more films, an occasional turn on TV, earned an Oscar for "The Cider House Rules" in 2000 and a nomination for "The Quiet American" in 2003. Despite his impressive work of recent times with a new generation of actors and directors, however, it is the distant past that still preoccupies him in "The Elephant to Hollywood."
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